Jay Kinney 606 Wellner ROad Naperville, Illinois, 60540 If anyone has ever said that fan-poetry is for shit, they should read thru THE LAST FAREWELL and quickly slink away guiltily. TLF was really a fine poem, and the only thing that worries me is that it might be true. Pearson communicates his feelings and emotions very well, and I am struck doubly as what he is talking about is an attitude that has taken hold of me in the past and will no doubt do so again in the future. Chuck has learned that the favor of "the Crowd" is cheap, but the reaction in the poem worries me as I feel that perhaps it is the wrong one to take. //CUT, CUT, CUT// If the poem is no longer valid and is follow thru of some temporary emotions Chuck had in the past -- //WHICH IS WHY I DID THE CUTTING ABOVE. CHUCK WROTE IT WHILE INVOLVED IN THOSE EMOTIONS IN THE PAST -- BUT WAS VERY SERIOUS WHEN HE WROTE IT -- BUT IT IS THE PAST, NOW. HOWEVER THE POEM IS STILL VALID, THO IN A MORE UNIVERSAL SENSE, AS IS ALL TRUE POETRY -- VALID BEYOND THE LIMITS OF A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL// -- I applaud him even more and say... fine work. //I TOO FELT IT WAS A VERY FINE PIECE OF WORK// It would seem that Stephen's hung up on one old book (old used loosely, not literally). I would send him THE BIBLE or something and let him chew on that for a century. As I recall, the fault I found most blatant in his article when I read it, was that he seemed to take fandom and fans out of the context of society as a whole (Stephen... fans are actually just regular people who happen to have gotten caught up in SFandom -- not some special breed of people that are supposed to be anti-intellectual or are supposed to be intellectual. They aren't supposed to be anything. Oh, I might wish that there were a few more serious zines around... but you or I are never going to get more of them by berating the editors of the ones run for fun or kicks or whatever. We are all fulfilling our particular needs thru fandom and you are not going to get anywhere telling people what their needs are and aren't.) Actually I would rather see some things from Pickering of an intellectual nature that aren't defending intellectualism or clouding up the intelligibility with big words. Hell, a big vocab is great, but one has to consider one's audience, and he is never going to convince fen that "intellectuals" are wonderful or whatever if he won't come off his high horse and actually try to communicate. Has he read ATLAS SHRUGGED? If not he should... he seems to be in the same dogmatic ship as old Ayn. Hmmm. Maybe Stephen should read Parable 5 in this NEM too. [pp. 48 - 49, "Your 5 Cents Worth," Letter 10, NO-EYED MONSTER #10, Winter 1966- 67] [Jay Kinney went on to make a fairly large Name for himself in the underground comics scene and later founded GNOSIS: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, a major intellectual, spiritually-focussed quarterly. ~~nem, 6.April.2001]
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