Quark/4: Davidson, Moorcock, Persky, Farmer and Platt

Way back in 2014, we read Quark/3, the third number of Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker's quarterly paperback presentation of SF that was somewhat outside the mainstream.  I also own a copy of the fourth and final issue of Quark, 1971's Quark/4.  My copy of Quark/4, previously owned by a personage named "Shan," is in quite good condition; maybe Shan never read it.  (I have several of Shan's books, which I purchased in April 2016 at a Half Price Books in Ohio--remember Harlan Ellison's Doomsman?  I think Harlan may have wanted you to forget!)

 I should have taken this picture before I'd bent the spine to scan the pages you'll see below--
you'll have to take my word for it that Shan left it in near mint condition 

I covered Quark/3 over three blog posts, and I guess we'll devote three to Quark/4 as well.  Today let's read the contributions by Avram Davidson, Michael Moorcock, Stan Persky, Philip José Farmer and Charles Platt.

"Basileikon: Summer" by Avram Davidson

This story by the critically acclaimed writer and editor of SF and detective stories, has, as far as I can tell, only ever appeared here in Quark/4.

"Basileikon: Summer" is a sort of collection of vignettes of New York life, portraits of New York characters, and is full of sex jokes and ethnic jokes.  Puerto Rican women throw garbage out of their apartment windows into the backyard, so that it is now a foot deep in garbage.  Black nationalist and would-be dictator of New York Hulber Rudolph abandons his slave name and takes up the name Zimbabwe Kunalinga, and swears vengeance on the black women who laugh at his new dashiki.  An unsuccessful painter, an old man who has has lived in the same apartment for decades, owning ten cats in succession and watching all the Irish people who resided there when he moved in be replaced by Hispanic immigrants, spends money on paint he should spend on food.  An unsuccessful writer waits in his agent's office, frustrated when his agent ignores him in favor of a successful African-American writer.  And so on.

I'm a sucker for New York stories, and "Basileikon: Summer" is clever and amusing, and also quite sad.  I like it, but be forewarned--it ain't woke.

"Voortrekker" by Michael Moorcock

This is a Jerry Cornelius story; according to isfdb, the twelfth.  I read some Jerry Cornelius things in my late teens or early twenties, so over two decades ago--I think The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer in the 1977 Avon omnibus The Cornelius Chronicles with the Stanislaw Fernandes cover.  During my high school and Rutgers years I read tons of Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, but the Jerry Cornelius things I read interested me relatively little; I liked Elric the best, of course, but also liked Corum and John Daker and Von Bek and the first two Dancers at the End of Time books and found the Hawkmoon and Bastable books tolerable, though I thought the Mars books written under the Edward P. Bradbury pseudonym to be lame.  My memories of The Final Programme are that I found it underwhelming and annoying--it felt sarcastic instead of sincere, part of it was a joke retelling of one of the most famous Elric plots, and part of it was a lot of gush about the Beatles.  I had enjoyed the sincere melodrama of Elric and Corum, I didn't like the way the Cornelius story undermined my beloved Elric, and maybe writing about how great the Beatles were was edgy when The Final Programme first appeared in 1968, but by the 1980s lionizing the Beatles was the opposite of edgy, it was banal and boring--my mother liked the Beatles, for Christ's sake!  I also felt The Final Programme was an attack on the United States and a smug dismissal of anti-communism, which was the last thing I wanted to read in high school and college, when I was being fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism and socialism by my teachers and professors.

Anyway, for a few years I have been thinking I should take another crack at Jerry Cornelius--maybe over 25 years my tastes have changed, and maybe my memory has exaggerated the negative aspects of the Cornelius stories.  I suppose "Voortrekker," which would be reprinted in the many editions of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, is as good a place to start as any.  (Wikipedia claims that "Voortrekker" first appeared in the British underground paper Frendz, a piece of information not found at isfdb or anywhere in Quark/4.)

"Voortrekker" turns out to be a very New Wavey story, twenty pages divided into twenty six chapters with titles from Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley songs, chapters that consist largely of long quotes from books by Frantz Fanon and Charles Harness and newspapers touching on Cold War and post-imperial topics, like Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, non-white immigration into England, fighting in Cambodia and Vietnam, North Korean complaints about Japanese trade policy, etc.  The plot of the story, such as it is, is related in fragmentary vignettes of Jerry Cornelius travelling through time and between alternate versions of the world (at least I think that is what is happening) making contacts, collecting cryptic messages, and assassinating people.  The word "entropy" comes up several times, and basic themes are imperialism, racism, and women and children getting killed.  (All these plot elements and themes of a dangerous journey, racism, violence and collapsing empires are summed up in the story's title; the choice of title is probably the most effective thing about this story.)  The whole thing is vague and inconclusive--Cornelius doesn't know what is going on, why he is doing what he is doing, and what is going to happen, and neither do we readers--which I guess is in keeping with the entropy theme.  Cornelius's contacts seem to be participating in wars and revolutions not out of ideological conviction but because they think it is fun to do so.  At the start and end of the story Cornelius plays in a rock band, and maybe we readers are supposed to think that politics--or at least violent and deceptive politics--is a pointless, counterproductive waste of time, that it is art that is worthwhile.

This story is not very fun or interesting, there is really no plot or character development, and the many images of people smoking and flourishing weapons and driving in various vehicles are just brief flickers rather than anything sharp or rich.  "Voortrekker" is a mood piece that overstays its welcome and belabors its point, portraying life as incomprehensible and frustrating, and itself feeling like a waste of time bereft of anything tangible for the reader to hold on to.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

from The Day by Stan Persky

Click to enlarge

Lying between the Moorcock and the Farmer, though not listed in the table of contents or on isfdb, is an eight-page excerpt from the book The Day by Canadian writer Stan Persky.  Wikipedia indicates that Persky has written many books on gay issues, late Cold War topics like the foreign policy of the Reagan administration and the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and life in post-communist Europe, as well as books about Canadian politics.  These eight pages are a stream of consciousness wall of text that I found rather difficult to read.  In case you are interested in seeing what sort of prose strains my 48-year-old noggin, I reproduce here a page on which, I think, a guy is having breakfast (cream of wheat and/or badly made pancakes) with a friend, a cat comes in the room, and the guy daydreams that the house he is in and house next door are warships from the Age of Sail exchanging broadsides.

There are many works of great literature that make demands on their readers, things like Moby Dick, In Search of Last Time, and The Waste Land.  I personally have found investing effort into reading Melville, Proust, and Eliot to be very rewarding.  Maybe Stan Persky's The Day would be very rewarding to the reader willing to make a commitment to reading it with attention, but I don't feel that I have the time and energy to make that commitment myself.

"Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" by Philip José Farmer 

I actually own this story in another book, the Farmer collection Riverworld and Other Stories; I read three stories from it full of disturbing sex meant to shock your bourgeois sensibilities back at the very end of 2015.  Farmer provides a foreword to "Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" in that 1979 collection, in which he tells the sad story of how, when he lived in Los Angeles and was working for the aerospace industry (I guess as a technical writer), a flash flood destroyed his decades-old collection of pulp magazines and old Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum books.  Damn!  "Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" also appears in DAW's The Book of Philip José Farmer.

"Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" is a farcical story about a drunken and impecunious Gentile poet, Brass, who lives in a Jewish neighborhood in Beverly Hills.  Brass and a Jewish woman, Samantha Gold, who loves the taste of pork but has almost no opportunity to eat pork sandwiches because her husband keeps her a virtual ;prisoner in their home, meet and fall in love.  Mrs. Gold starts to regularly sneak away to Brass's place to eat pork and have sex.  She introduces Brass to her father, a veteran of World War One who was an officer on a Zeppelin that bombed London.  This old Jew hates the governor, whom he calls Abdul von Schicklgruber (in 1971 in real life the governor of California was Ronald Reagan, though I'm not sure if this story is supposed to take place in real life or what year it is supposed to take place in), and on the same day Brass decides to leave town and Mrs. Gold declines to run away with him, electing instead to stay with her husband, her father takes off in a small Zeppelin he has built himself to bomb Sacramento.

This joke story, which is like 13 pages long, might be considered by some to be anti-Semitic or anti-feminist, but that is not why I am giving it a thumbs down.  My complaint is that it is not funny, and it is too silly to arouse any emotional attachment to its characters.  There is a lot of dramatic potential in a sexual relationship which crosses boundaries of class and faith, and in an old man who is obsessed with his youthful war experiences, but Farmer doesn't develop any real drama, instead focusing on lame jokes about how Mrs. Gold's expanding waistline makes it harder for her to sneak out and about how expensive things are in Beverly Hills.

"The Song of Passing" by Marco Cacchioni

Also missing from the table of contents page is a poem by Marco Cacchioni.  It is not very good.  A quick google search suggests this is Cacchioni's only published poem.  Hopefully Cacchioni, described as a young student in the "Contributors' Notes" at the back of Quark/4, went on to a successful life as a hedge fund manager or brain surgeon or something with a loving wife and a bunch of happy kids.

"Norman vs. America" by Charles Platt

Platt, a British immigrant to America himself, contributes to Quark/4 a choose-your-own-adventure comic book of 21 pages about a young Englishman who comes to the USA to make his fortune.  Platt even drew the panels himself!  The choices readers are to make are all goofy reflections of late-'60s/early-'70s cultural preoccupations--should Norman become a member of the Silent Majority or a student revolutionary?  Should Norman take to the streets of New York to work as a cab driver or a mugger, or instead start a dildo factory?  Some of the jokes are pretty "out there" by today's standards, like when Norman, after being castrated, becomes a child molester.

Click to enlarge

Platt is no Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb, but this comic is sort of amusing.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about "Norman vs. America" is the gamebook format--the first Choose Your Own Adventure did not appear until 1979, so I guess Platt is sort of an unacknowledged pioneer of the format, one which I, and millions of others, have cherished since our youths, which were full of CYOA, Fighting Fantasy and Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books.  Platt, on the first page of the comic, acknowledges that "Norman vs. America" "is from an original idea by John T. Sladek", so maybe it was Sladek who came up with the gamebook idea.

[UPDATE NOVEMBER 18, 2019: In the comments below Matthew Davis describes the pioneering role of John Sladek in the development of the beloved gamebook format.  Check it out!]

Like "Basileikon : Summer," I think "Norman vs. America" only ever appeared here in Quark/4, so all you Platt and Davidson enthusiasts need to get a hold of a copy.  As I write this draft of this blog post on November 10, there is a copy of Quark/4 signed by Larry Niven available on ebay for fifteen bucks.

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Five experimental stories; the only one I can really recommend as a fun read is the Davidson, though all the others (though the Farmer the least) have interesting aspects and are worth a look.

More Quark/4 in our next episode!