monthly digest: june 2025
main pop ghosts, jane austen, fritz leiber, and more
June, hm. What can we say about June? It was a month. It lasted thirty days. Each of those days lasted twenty-four hours. Remarkable. Remarkable.
June in fiction
a june ghost story
You can know where something was, but you can’t know where it is. You don’t know anything, until you look, but then when you look, you only know the past. That was a rule, right? Some German guy.… Hindenburg, maybe.
This story exists because I thought Gordon Lightfoot’s song “If I Could Read Your Mind” contained the lines “and I will never be set free / as long as I’m a ghost you can see.” It does not contain these lines.
June in posts
There seems to be no way around this fact, but… June was a month in which I had no thoughts at all. As the poet says, “I got nothin’ in my brain.” It do be like that sometimes?????
However, I did have one annoying experience:
June in capsule reviews
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Alec Nevala-Lee, 2018)
June in writing abroad
It’s always funny when you have two different things you wrote at very distant from one another times get published almost back to back. I wrote these something like nine months apart more or less. But here they are! Together!
June in perfume
Also, shout out / thank you to
who had a copy of Scent and Subversion she gave to me. Her newsletter is very good and she has great range; she’s in the subgenre on here of people who love classical music without feeling like a lost Crane sibling:She also included some perfume samples which events in transit turned into a potential future game called So You Think You Can Smell:
June in Evangelion
You know what I do not like…? The Evangelion manga.
June in snake friends
I was born in the year of the snake, and it’s the year of the snake, so I’m being a bit over the top about it. It’s important to have one’s “things.” Anyway. Here are some little snake friends acquired in June:
I did not think Zoologist’s “King Cobra,” which I ordered a sample of despite knowing I probably won’t like it, would make it, because it got stuck in customs. But here it is, arrived today. Heroic snake friend! (The perfume sample that is illegible despite my best efforts is called “The Cobra & The Canary.”)
June in music videos I watched too many times
Audrey Hobert also has a Substack. We all got Substacks!
June in research anecdotes over which I let forth a wry chuckle.…
I picked up Thomas Disch’s book about science fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. Disch was memorably described by John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern sf writers of the first rank,” one of those phrases you see and instantly know it will be attached to that person forever, which is probably annoying if you are that person. I cannot speak to its accuracy personally—the only novel by Disch that I’ve read is his 1965 debut The Genocides, a book about which I have mixed thoughts.1
Anyway, when it arrived in the mail, I naturally flipped to the chapter on My Girls. Disch, frankly, isn’t all that big on My Girls (though he seems properly afraid of Joanna Russ). He spends most of the chapter trashing Ursula K. Le Guin (“one does not read Le Guin for fun, or excitement, or wild ideas, nor yet for what is often accounted SF’s raison d’être, a sense of wonder”; “the sense of grievance expressed by Le Guin…[is] characteristic of feminism in its more territorial moments”). His list of Le Guin’s banalities culminates in a prolonged attack on her anthology of science fiction for Norton. Here, Disch quotes another critic, George Slusser:
Norton Anthologies, through their usefulness in the classroom, are notorious canon-makers. And because of this The Norton Book will always be there, offering a large number of stories at a reasonable price, it will be used in the ever-increasing number of courses offered in colleges and universities in this field. Its very economic presence then represents, de facto, canon. In today’s academic climate however, market shares can be sizeably increased if the “correct” theoretical spin is given to a book.... [However, SF has proven] recalcitrant to legislation from without by any ideology, let alone the so-called ethical demands of the academy's politically correct. ... It is not enough to season recognized SF texts (as is done here) with stories by little magazine writers and others who have little or no connection... with SF. SF texts must be bent to the will of the righteous.... The result is a masterpiece of totalitarian propaganda.
Slusser’s review is in an issue of a magazine (Foundation) that I have yet to find a copy of on eBay or online. (I’m keeping an eye out.) Still, what can one say to this sort of thing but:
Slusser has half a point, actually, in that anthologies are very important to canon formation. This is why Disch can open his chapter with the usual claim that there weren’t really any girls to speak of in the pulp era of SFF: they mostly weren’t anthologized, so people forgot about them.2 But they were there, and not only permitted in, as Disch claims, as wives. Anyway once I get a copy of the magazine I will deal with this with a little more thoughtfully and little less HOES MAD. Or maybe I won’t. We’ll see.
June bugs bring July posts….
A June ghost story.
Based on a true story! Kind of.
Some books I’ve got pre-ordered:3
The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon (Laurie Gwen Shapiro)
H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space (Gou Tanabe, trans. Zack Davisson)
Visions and Temptations (Harald Voetmann, trans. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen)
Evangelion slouches roughly toward Rebuild:
Keep your calendars clear for July 12. :) For some reason I wrote “July 5” in the manga post but that was an error. July 12.
Perfumes I have queued up:
Big ol’ Guerlain post in the pipeline!
There’s a moment in which a character who has become so grotesquely fat that she can’t move gets sucked into some kind of engine:
Though her vision was beginning to flicker like badly spliced film, she was certain in the last moments of consciousness that she could see the great, palpitant maw of the thing, a brilliant rosy orange that could only be called Pango Peach and, superimposed over it, a grille of scintillating Cinderella Red. The grille seemed to grow at an alarming pace. Then she felt the whole mass of her being swept up in the whirlwind, and for a brief, weightless moment she was young again, and then she spattered over the grille like a cellophane bag of water dropped from a great height.
In the root they heard the popping sound distinctly.
You can see that that this is a funny and memorable passage. And yet, I want to hurl in a way that feels a little unfair. Hence, mixed. Pop. Pop pop pop.
Now you, industrious reader, have probably gone to look at the table of contents for the Norton anthology and returned to say that Disch is pissy about not being in it. You are like a little baby and you are not able to divine the mind of Disch. Actually, he refused to be in it. You need to get on his level to understand these things. P.S. He wrote The Brave Little Toaster. That’s being vast and containing multitudes for you.
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The Dreams Are Stuff is Made Of was largely greeted, inside the field, with comments to the effect of "Gosh, Tom can write, but he's sure full of sh*t sometimes."
Disch was a really fine writer, and a pugnacious critic who was often (in my opinion) wrong, but almost always entertainingly so. He was sometimes apparently difficult to deal with (I never met him myself) especially in his last few years, after his partner Charles Naylor died. My favorite among his novels is Camp Concentration, though On Wings of Song is also very highly regarded. He was a first rate poet as well.
Foundation is a British magazine so I think it can be hard to find. I subscribed for a few years but let it lapse.
Thanks for the very kind mention! Unfortunately I think "Crane Brother" might be my final form.