Re: The Cimmerian Blog Archive and Website

Don't worry if you don't know what I'm talking about. Feel free to skip it. But if you do, and need to know anything, here's my official statement:

I have asked Leo Grin to remove my blog posts from The Cimmerian blog archive and he has complied. While I am grateful for the chance to be a part of the blog when it was an active player in Robert E. Howard fandom, in its dotage (and in the wake of Leo's exit from Howard fandom) I find my beliefs and personal ethics do not align with the owner of the blog and did not wish to give my consent, implicit or otherwise, to the archive's change in direction and the material that has been altered on the site itself.

That's all you need to know, at the moment.

Making Schedules

Last year, I used my Google Calendar for the first time, and I mean, I really used it. I added dates, set up timers, the works, and baby, it was glorious...until the big-ass digital projection project landed and disrupted my space-time continuum for seven months. Then it was superfluous.

But for those first five months, I was on task and bright-eyed and bushy tailed, and oh, you betcha, stuff got done. So, in keeping with my stated goal of writing a half million words in a year's time, I'm going to do it again.

That's what I'm working on today, in between selling tickets to The Interview for tonight's show. See? here I am:

Note the Douche-Antenna in my ear, ensuring that whoever
I'm talking to will know how important I am. 

This is what my tentative schedule looks like for 2015. Keep in mind that it's all VERY tentative, especially the National shows, because I have to balance this with travel, the theater, and a bunch of other things. And it doesn't include writing, either, which gets done around all of this. Still, it's a heck of a line-up:

ConDFW

Feb 13-15

STAPLE! in Austin
March 7-8

PCA/ACA New Orleans

April 1 – 4

Robert E. Howard Days

June 11 – 14

SoonerCon

June 26-28

ArmadilloCon

July 24-26

Necronomicon Providence

August 20 – 23

DragonCon

Sept 4 – 7

FenCon

Sept 25-27

As for writing, I have one thing on my plate that will get finished before I do anything else. I was supposed to finish it last year, and it got trampled by a play schedule. So: no play schedule, and I'm clearing the decks for what's coming up. What is coming up, you ask?

My First WorldCon: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

It was so hot, the sun cooked the skirt
right off of my dashboard hula dancer. 

 LoneStarCon 3 has come and gone, and boy, are my arms tired. It was my first ever WorldCon, and I had zero idea of what to expect. Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to help out with some of the programming, or agree to curate an exhibit on Robert E. Howard’s legacy, or agree to serve on the ALAMO board of directors, at least not until I knew what I was getting myself into.

The logistics of putting on a WorldCon are not much different from other conventions; there’s just more of them. There’s programming out the wazoo at WorldCon, and multiple dances, and of course, the awards ceremony. It’s a lot like putting on three conventions’ worth of activities in one weekend. This is compounded by the fact that the Floating Temporary Permanent Volunteer WorldCon Committee (hereby acronymed down to F.T.P.V.W.C., or “Fit-Piv-Wic,” with the accent on the second syllable) are attempting to organize the entire thing while literally scattered across the country. This adds a layer of organization, communication, and functionality (not to mention disparate personality types) to an activity that usually isn’t so contentious when people are looking at each other from across the room.

In fact, there’s so much to talk about regarding this first WorldCon from my own limited, biased, and narrow point of view, that I’m going to break it up into areas for those of you who only want to read about my hardships, or maybe you just want to hear my thoughts on the convention in general. Feel free to skim over the topic headings until you see what you like, or just start at the top and slog your way through it all, much like I had to do last week.

My Personal Saga

I’ll spare you the minutiae and cover the high points: on Monday, I had major car trouble that put me six hours behind and over three hundred dollars light. On Tuesday, I found out that the exhibit space I’d designed for was in no way, shape or form related to the exhibit space I got. It was absolute hash. I left it in impartial hands, thankfully, and they were able to make sense of what needed to happen, brilliantly so. But they had to do it all on Wednesday, while I was on a twelve-hour long bus trip to Cross Plains and back. That evening, I ate undercooked bacon at Denny’s and got food poisoning. Thursday and part of Friday was spent in recovery from that—it sapped a lot of my strength, obviously. By Saturday, I was ready to play, but Saturday and Sunday were my busiest days. After panels, and then dinner (and by the way, my system never really recovered completely from the Denny’s meal), I was out of gas completely. Only on Monday did I get any bar time, which was awesome, and all too brief.

Not my best convention, on a personal note. Not by a long shot. However, it was not a total bust.

Name Checking for Fun and Profit

The sheer number of folks I saw and had brief interactions with are legion. Granted, many of them are Texas regulars, but some are not and it was awesome to see them again. My only real complaint was that I didn’t get nearly enough bar time to chill out, have a laugh or two, and be the convivial and charming raconteur that I usually am at these kinds of things. I think we all know who lost here: Texas.

But seeing Jess Nevins, Daryl Gregory, Nancy Hightower, Maurice Broaddus, Paolo Bacigalupi, Caroline and Warren Specter, John Klima, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Peggy Hailey, Joe Lansdale, Kasey Lansdale, Howard Waldrop, Scott Cupp, John Picacio, Sanford Allen, Stina Leicht, Rhonda Eudaly, Martha Wells, Jessica Reissman, Lillian Stewart Carl, Patrice Sarath, Paige E. Ewing, Josh Roundtree,  Lon Prater,Vincent Villafranca, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Ann Vander Meer, David Spurlock, Chris N. Brown, Lawrence Person, Paul Benjamin, Alan Porter, Derek Johnson, Lou Anders, Don Webb and all the rest of the Southwestern Fans and Friends was wonderful, if all too brief. I got to wave at Steven Brust from a crowded elevator, shout at Brad Denton as we were running in opposite directions, bellow at Paul Cornell, blurt at John Scalzi, and otherwise ping-pong around the parties, spreading the love. I also met a lot of new folks, and talk to a ton of enthusiastic fans. More on this, later.

I got to have dinner with Ray Guns Over Texas editor Rick Klaw and his wife, Brandy, the most, along with my old friend and program participant Weldon Adams (also my roommate for this little odyssey). And of course, Team REH: Paul Herman, Rusty Burke, Bill “Indy” Cavalier, Dennis McHaney, Jeff Shanks, Dave Hardy (with serious help from wife Julie and daughter Brigid), Damon Sasser, Rob Roehm, and all the way from France, Patrice Louinet.  This was my home base, and these folks more or less kept me sane, hydrated, and made sure I was wearing pants and not running late to any panels. Thanks a million, folks.

Robert E. Howard

Some of you may have noticed that there were, ah, a few panels on Robert E. Howard and his legacy. This was completely intentional. When I was asked to help out with the programming duties, I was told that there were absolutely zero panels on Robert E. Howard at the last Texas WorldCon, in 1997. This is not surprising. The 1990s are something of a Dark Ages for Howard Studies, with no copies of Howard’s own Conan books on the shelves and no real intentions to do so. It wasn’t until around the late 1990s that Wandering Star entered the picture, with their desire to produce authoritative texts of Howard’s work, in deluxe hardcover editions, and with high end illustrations. That was the start of the REH Renaissance, really. So, a lot has happened in the thirteen years between Texas WorldCons. A lot.

That track of programming was a corrective, and it was extremely successful. We had large crowds for most of the panels (the poetry stuff was a bust, frankly, and no one could find the film programming to come see “Barbarian Days”) and lot of participation. But in particular, I slanted the panels to hit the older fans. When I came down for the big meeting in April, I had two people pull me aside—older men, both—and tell me how pleased and excited they were to see that REH was going to be on the panels this year. They were big fans, they told me, and read all of that stuff in the 1970s. I asked them, “Have you been keeping up with what we’ve been doing in the past fifteen years?” Oh, no, they said. They just read the books and really enjoyed them, but they haven’t looked at them since the seventies. Heh. Okay, guys, this panel’s for you.

I intentionally loaded the topics to entice the older fans. We had an obligatory Conan panel, and that room was packed. Even better, it was a smashing success. I opened it up to talk about pop culture Conan, and everyone stayed right on Robert E. Howard’s Conan the whole time. Fantastic. And the more we talked about corrupted texts, bad biographical practices, ulterior motives, and the complicated relationship between the fans and L. Sprague de Camp, I saw more light bulbs going on behind these guys’ eyes. Oh, there were a few of them who wanted to debate the point, citing de Camp’s standing as a gifted and talented author, and blah blah blah. I told one of them what I always say, which is that de Camp was great for Conan, but really lousy for Robert E. Howard. That pretty much ended the discussion.We opened a lot of eyes and changed a lot of minds over the four day weekend.

The Robert E. Howard exhibit got a lot of traffic, as did the Robert E. Howard Foundation Table. Lots of books were sold, memberships handed out, and we all had a ton of great conversations with people who were genuinely interested in REH, his works, and what we were doing there. It was everything that we wanted WFC 2006 to be, and more.

WorldCon

San Antonio, invaded by Martian Walkers. Cool.

My non-REH programming was great. In hindsight, I wish I’d had more of it. But I was on a mission, so, you know... It was a scandal-free WorldCon, for which I am terribly grateful, even though now in the various armchair reports coming out, the very same issues are coming up: more parity, more youth, more inclusiveness, etc. I don’t disagree with any of those comments. This year’s convention attendees looked old. They just did. I say that with grey in my temples, too. It was an old, white, sausage fest. And yet, there were a number of interesting contradictions that reared up during the show.

The kid’s programming was hands down the best kid’s programming I’d ever seen in 20+ years of going to conventions. It was awesome. All of it. Make your own lightsabers? Jet packs? Steampunk nerf guns?  Captain America shields? Intro role-playing lessons? Good Lord, I wanted to do all of that, and more. Our REH Camp Mascot, Brigid, was in and out of the kid’s programming all weekend, constantly showing us the new thing she’d built. They let the kids pour metal figures, for crying out loud. How freaking cool is that?

And yet, there were so few kids and parents there for the duration. Granted, there were a number of one day passes with moms and girls, but that’s not the issue. That programming track was brilliant, and no one knew about it. That should be an up-front feature for WorldCon: “Bringing the Next Generation into Fandom, one Jet Pack at a time!” It needed to be a button on the main page, next to General Info. You want younger kids? Parents? Youth? You’ve got to let them know that stuff like that is already in place.

I know a number of women in Texas fandom, and also creators. My own areas of programming were pretty limited to sausage-y things, but we tried, we really tried, to get women on the panels wherever we could. Granted, I wasn’t working on a Y.A. track, but we did as much as we really could. I asked folks, “what do you want to be on?” and then took those answers straight to programming. And during the con, I asked people what they thought, how the panels went, etc. and by and large the replies were overwhelmingly positive.

Attendance was good. You wouldn’t know it unless you were in a packed panel, because the con was spread way-the-hell-out all over the convention center. I really hate the San Antonio Convention Center (and the Marriot hotels right next to it). Overpriced, overblown, inconvenient, and generally there to fleece the tourists. The last five trips I’ve made to San Antonio have all been to that Marriot and Convention Center. I’ve got good friends in San Antonio, who love the town, but I personally hate the Riverwalk and all that is clustered around it. It’s just so inauthentic, and really lame. A shopping mall, so close to the Alamo, just makes my teeth itch.

This being my first WorldCon, and being on the inside of some things, too, was very eye-opening. Now that I’ve seen one run, and gotten a glimpse at how the sausage is made, I am somewhat mollified. That doesn’t mean that what the other bloggers are saying about how the convention needs to skew younger, be more inclusive, etc, isn’t spot-on, but I’ll do my list anyway, and discuss some of the practical considerations inherent in changing the mission of WorldCon.

Fixing WorldCon for the 75^th Anniversary

Everyone wants it fixed “NOW” and well, that’s just not possible. But there are four years until 2017, the 75^th WorldCon, and that’s a great deadline to have some of these things in place for a newer, shinier convention that will return it to its former glory.

Fix the Hugos. There’s a list of things that people have been complaining about the Hugos for years, and fixing them would be ideal. The best, easiest example: Add a Y.A. category. That they haven’t done this yet is stupid, and smacks of an answer that I heard often during this process “But that’s the way we’ve always done it.” The success, the popularity, and the importance of the surge in the young adult market cannot be overstated. Embrace it. That’s just one example. But you get what I’m talking about. It’s time to stop being so snooty about science fiction. When it started, it was full of pulps and comics. Let’s never forget that.

Add Media, Gaming, and YA to the programming. This doesn’t have to be odious. I know many of the FiTPiVWiCs and SMOFs that I talked to don’t want the show to get any bigger. Well, not the size of DragonCon, anyway. But consider this instead: how about inviting one or two game creators to the show? How about one or two TV series or movie makers? Writers and artists? Not the whole cast and crew of the Avengers, but what about just inviting Joss Whedon? See, you can keep it cerebral, focused on the written word, and interesting to fans without having Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man suit onhand. Now, you’ll probably have to pay for these people to show up, but I think the cost of doing business with them will more than pay for itself. As for Young Adult programming—guess what? That’s hotter than Georgia Asphalt right now. It was a packed panel at WorldCon this year. Why was there only one?  It’s because the FiTPiVWiCs and SMOFs don’t read Young Adult books. That’s why. Simple. 

Here’s a freebie, London: Next year is the 30^th anniversary of the film Buckaroo Banzai. Get the director, D.W. Richter and the writer, Earl Mac Rauch, and maybe Peter Weller, to come in and talk about the film. Outside of airfare and hotel rooms, I’m willing to bet you that they are pretty cheap. You’ll get a packed house at the panel, and long lines for the autographing. And who knows? Die-hard BB fans may just come to your show BECAUSE you’re doing it. Granted, it may only be about a couple of hundred Uber-fans of Buckaroo Banzai, but isn’t 200 memberships worth it? But you need to lock it down fast, and then advertise the hell out of it, because otherwise, how will people know? Just listing it won’t get it done. You’ve got to start selling WorldCon from scratch, because there are far more people (like the 60,000 that showed up at DragonCon last week) who don’t know who or what WorldCon is than those that do right now. 

Make an effort to include more Fans. Granted, fixing the programming above will take care of some of this on its own. But other fan groups need some love, too. The costume contest in San Antonio was non-existent. Oh, I mean, there was one, but for a WorldCon, it was pretty anemic. Why? Because the Greybeards, as they were dubbed during the convention, don't dress up anymore. There should have been four days of costume programming, themed to coincide with each day of the show. And there could be. The facilities were there, in spades.There were two hundred people working on WorldCon. Surely a few more volunteers to get the costuming up to a fever pitch wouldn't have added to anyone's work load.

Stop going toe-to-toe with DragonCon. Just stop it, please. And don't you dare say "well, it's ALWAYS been on Labor Day weekend." Don't you even friggin' think it. Conventions move around. Nothing is set in stone. Go back to early August for WorldCon and stop trying to slug it out with the second-largest Pop Culture convention in the country. That ain't your fight, so quit making it your fight.

This doesn’t have to happen all at once. But I think the groups that just won the bids for the upcoming shows would do well to listen to what paying members past and present, many of whom are professional writers and artists, have said about WorldCon. They are the customers. They are telling you what they want to see at future shows. This shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out. And while the convention itself is non-profit (another mistake, in my opinion), there is still an impetus to make money every year.

Final Thoughts

The Riverwalk, under attack. Note the tractor beam. Neat!

Will I go to another WorldCon? Yeah, probably. I wouldn’t travel to one, unless I was nominated for something, and I don’t have the body of work or the fans to make that happen yet. I would consider helping out with another WorldCon in Texas, but only if all of the above points were addressed—and maybe additionally, only if I were involved with the bid so as to address all of the above, right out of the gate. My single biggest frustration to this year’s WorldCon was not being able to advocate for, say, Dallas or Fort Worth instead of San Antonio. It would have been much easier to plan for and do stuff with a convention and a group of fans that I’d worked with before. But that’s all beside the point. The show was good, and can be a major thing again. It needs a little help, from outside forces, and a lot of leadership and direction from within, if it’s going to make those changes and still be a viable convention.

Me? I’m still recovering. The drive alone has rendered me spent and goofy. It’ll be a month until I’m fixed. But I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about later. Hopefully, it won’t involve any “twerking” scandals. Twerking. Pfft. You ever get the feeling that we’re all being punked by Ashton Kutcher?

This is my WorldCon Schedule

It's a lot of stuff, but in my defense, a big chuck of it is all Robert E. Howard-related. The rest is a mix of groups, receptions, and clutches of things I've done with other people, and a few panels that have nothing to do with REH. Oh, and a beer session, a reading, and an autographing. Fair warning: I will be in huckster mode during this convention, in that I'll have stuff for sale and it'll likely be on me at all times. Nothing too expensive, mind you: the Tinglers are only two bucks a piece, for Pete's sake. Twelve dollars is the upper limit. So, I'm selling, but it's all AFFORDABLE, see?

Enough of that. Here's my schedule for WorldCon, and I'd appreciate any prayers or good vibes. I'm gonna need it to get through all of this!

The First Barbarian of Texas: Conan the Cimmerian

Thursday 12:00 - 13:00

For over 80 years, Conan has ruled the roost as the literary and pop culture definition of "barbarian." What makes Conan so popular in and out of the U.S., with readers and film-goers, and fans of all ages? Is his reign likely to continue into the 22nd century?

You Don't Know Jack about Bob: What's New in Robert E. Howard Studies

Thursday 13:00 - 14:00

If you read the Conan paperbacks in the 1970s and 1980s, but haven't checked out what's been going on in the wild world of Robert E. Howard since the Millennium, then you have missed out on a lot! In the last decade there have been new biographical discoveries, new authoritative editions of Howard's work, and so much more. Come get caught up with some noted experts.

The Apes of Wrath!

Thursday 15:00 - 16:00

Join Rick Klaw and his cadre of authors as they discuss the idea of a literary ape anthology and how it all came to be.

Reception & Readings: Rayguns Over Texas

Thursday 18:30 - 20:30

This reception is the launch of Rayguns Over Texas, a new anthology edited by Rick Klaw and published by the Fan Association of Central Texas. Note: This event will be held at the central branch of San Antonio Public Library.

Barbarian Days: Starring the BNFs of Howard Fandom

Friday 13:00 - 14:00

A warm-hearted documentary about the annual celebration of Robert E. Howard and the devoted fans who make the trip to Cross Plains, Texas, every year. Our film festival will be screening this film, followed by a discussion with the subjects of the documentary.

Two-Gun Bob: The Somewhat True Tales of Robert E. Howard

Friday 16:00 - 17:00

Writing a biography is an inexact science, and it's made all the more difficult when the subject in question was less than truthful about what they chose to tell other people about themselves. Four Robert E. Howard experts will shatter long-standing myths about Howard's life and talk about how they separate fact from fiction when writing about REH.

Literary Beer: Mark Finn, Jayme Lynn Blaschke

Saturday 15:00 - 16:00

Robert E. Howard: The Weird, West, and Worms

Saturday 17:00 - 18:00

Paper session. Jeffrey Shanks and Mark Finn, Independent Scholars, present "Vaqueros and Vampires: Robert E. Howard and the Genesis of the Weird Western." And Jeffrey Shanks, Independent Scholar, presents "Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E. Howard's 'Worms of the Earth.'"

Gorillas in Science Fiction: The Encore Performance!

Saturday 19:00 - 20:00

You've heard about it for years! Now it's back for one final presentation you do not want to miss! There is no movie that cannot be made better by the judicious application of a gorilla. Examples abound, and you'll get a ringside seat when our panel discusses the best -- and the worst -- of simian cinema, and celebrate the 80th anniversary of the film that started it all, KING KONG!

The Wild, Weird, and Wonderful Westerns of Robert E. Howard

Sunday 13:00 - 14:00

At the end of his life, Robert E. Howard was making good money writing humorous, and also very dark, westerns. In fact, westerns abound all throughout Howard's short, intense career. Our panelists talk about everything from the hilarious Breckinridge Elkins series to the deadly earnest story, "Wild Water."

Reading: Mark Finn

Sunday 16:00 - 16:30

Robert E. Howard at the Ice House

Sunday 18:00 - 19:00

Howard was an amateur boxer, and wrote mountains of boxing stories. No kidding! Here's a rare opportunity to hear about the boxing canon of Robert E. Howard from the editors of the FOUR VOLUME series currently being published by the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press. Warning: attending this panel may cause an outburst of laughter, followed by a burning desire to read Howard's boxing stories.

Comic Book Movies: From the Page to the Screen

Monday 10:00 - 11:00

There have been more comic book movies in the past decade than in the entire 20th century combined. How do they hold up? What are the best and the worst examples of a successful transition? Our panelists draw comparisons (and maybe even blood)!

Autographing: Yasser Bahjatt, Mark Finn, Susan Krinard, Walter John WIlliams

Monday 13:00 - 14:00

What Am I Bringing to WorldCon?

What an excellent question. I'll be in San Antonio, Texas, for a full week, and if I'm not loading or unloading enough stuff for a whole exhibit (see below), I'll be running around like a goon, from panel to panel. There will be eating and drinking, for sure, but over the years, I've gotten pretty good at knowing my limits and packing accordingly. Like many preppers, I too have a pre-built bag that I throw in the car with me at a moment's notice. The main difference is that I'm actually going to USE all of the things in my bag, because it's set up for a big-ass convention and not the Zombie Apocalypse...even if those two things have an awful lot in common.

I will likely be adding to this list, but for now, here's what my punch card looks like:

LUGGAGE:
This is important. For some reason, the con staff prefers that I wear pants. Pfft. Whatever.
--Peripherals (laptop, Ipad, smart phone)
--Extra socks
--Extra T shirts (it WILL be hotter than a kiln in San Antonio)
--bathing suit (in case I get a chance to hit the hot tub)
--toiletries (normal sized ones, at that)

TRAPPINGS OF THE PROFESSION:
This is also important. Thanks to the trusty Ipad, I can use it as a second brain.
--all of my readings on the Ipad
--extra business cards (I treat these like ninja stars and fling them in clusters)
--extra pens (both gel and sharpie, because you never know what people are going to ask you to sign. I once had John Hollis, a lovely British character actor who played Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back, sign the side of my head. One day, I hope to sign the side of someone's head. And so, the Sharpie.)
--traveling cables for cell phone, Ipad, and laptop
--a flask (for the necessary sips of adult beverages throughout the day)
--My Copy of Lone Star Universe (so I can get T.R. Fehrenbach to sign it. He's showing up for a panel on Alternate History Alamo stories. Genius!)

SURVIVAL:
Over the years, this part of the kit has gotten bigger and bigger. When I was sixteen, it simply said "Masking Tape." Now it's a separate shopping list.
--moleskin (for blisters)
--breath strips (con food is disgusting)
--Aspirin (no explanation necessary)
--Alka-Seltzer (see above)
--NyQuil (to offset Convention Crud--and also, to knock me out)
--energy bars, high in protein (for between panel boosts)
--multi-vitamins ("for men" which is code for "the prostate.")
--EmergenC (you know, that fizzy stuff that you gulp down with water?)
--a refillable Nalgene Water Bottle (critical to survival)
--Fisherman's Friend throat lozenges (because, let's face it, I'm a talker)

CURATING:
I'm in charge of the Robert E. Howard exhibit in the main hall. It's flattering to be asked, but the amount of stuff I'm driving to San Antonio is starting to overwhelm me. This will include:
--select items from the REH collection at the Cross Plains Library
--select items from the vaults of Paradox Entertainment
--select items from my personal collection
--select items courtesy of Dark Horse Comics
--a plastic warhammer (I don't want to get rough with any of you, but still...)
--at least one bottle of special libations to be shared as the weekend unfolds


LOOT:
There will be Mark Finn related merchandise on hand at WorldCon. The 2nd edition trade paperback version of Blood & Thunder will debut there at the REH Foundation Press table, and at a reasonable price, in case any of you would like to see the new book. Joe Lansdale, who wrote the introduction to the book, will be onhand as well, so you can get both of our illegible scribbles on your book. 

Also premiering at WorldCon is Ray Guns Over Texas, an anthology of Texas science fiction edited by Rick Klaw, and I just so happen to have a story in that book for your edification.

Some of the dealers will no doubt have copies of the other books I've done for Dark Horse, Wildside Press, Monkeybrain Books, and others. But if you're coming to see me, it's best to bring copies of what you own, if only so that you can embarrass me.

Here's the Exclusive loot:

-- a few copies of Road Trip, my Cupid and Elvis novella (I'm very fond of that story) This is the "director's cut" edition, with slight changes and corrections. $12 each.

--36 signed and numbered copies of On:REH, "a miscelleny of ideas, observations and tomfoolery from author, essayist and raconteur Mark Finn. Learn exactly what REHupa is, and marvel at its complicated (and improbable) history with Finn pulling all of the strings; find out what happens to authors after they die; get a front row seat at The Last Book Sale; take a ride with Sailor Tom Sharkey and Kid McCoy to El Paso, Texas, and more!" It's a one of a kind item that will not be reprinted and it's exclusive to WorldCon.  Only $10 a copy!

--Tingler Larvae (you heard me. Tinglers. As in, Tinglers. Play your cards right, and I'll include some Blast-Ended Skrewt eggs, too)


As soon as I know what my schedule is, I'll post it next.

"I Had No Idea he was a Racist Douchebag"

We just had a fan quit Robert E. Howard studies today. This person, who identified themselves only as "Red Dragon" on Facebook, announced their intention with that above line, and followed it with a short checklist of what was to come next. All of their books were to be binned, and they would unsubscribe from all of the REH lists that they were on. "I will seriously have sold my conan stuff by tomorrow and will never read another thing by him again," Red Dragon posted. Older, wiser heads attempted to prevail, but Red Dragon was presumably already long gone.

Now, I don't know anything about this person other than the fact that their picture on FaceBook was that of a woman, with blonde hair, maybe twenty-five to thirty. I make no assumptions as to if Red Dragon was truly a woman or a G.I.R.L. (Guy in Real Life). This is the Internet. Anything is possible.

But I do want to use this example to point out something: Here was a person, attracted to the writings of a long-dead author, so much so that they bought a pile of books, read them all, and jumped online and joined a number of fan groups, Facebook pages, and participated in discussions. I'd consider that to be fairly typical fan behavior, certainly well within the bounds of reason.

I don't know what Red Dragon ran across that made this sudden change happen--the popular supposition is that they read part of a discussion about a story Howard wrote when he was still a teenager called "The Last White Man." It's a bit of unpublished juvenilia about, well, you can guess what it's about. It was written in response to a letter penned by one of Howard's close, personal friends--a person who was, himself, a member of an organization that was active in the persecution of African-Americans. The story was not published in Howard's lifetime, and in fact, the only reason it was published at all was for the sake of completeness. Another gem from Howard's school days was "A Boy, A Beehive, and a Chinaman." So, you know, that's the thinking of a young Robert E. Howard, right there.

I want to say something, but it won't change anyone's mind. I'm a native Texan, and I'm over forty. This makes me the enemy in the eyes of the younger generations. But I want to walk carefully through this anyway, because it's taken me a while to get to this particular place. Maybe my journey will be of some use to someone out there. Maybe.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about Red Dragon's sudden reversal was that there was no attempt to square the things that originally attracted Red Dragon to Howard's writing, so much so that they would seek out other like-minded people, and the story in question that they heard about in an online conversation. Red Dragon basically threw Howard under the bus with the revelation that he wrote "the Last White Man." Granted, it's not Howard's finest hour, and I wouldn't recommend the story to, well, anyone--and I say that having written charitably a half million words on Howard in the last fifteen years. But this was clearly not something that Red Dragon had picked up on prior to their  declaration, and for one very likely reason: that's not the takeaway message from Robert E. Howard's work.

Oh, the Internet will tell you differently, to be sure. There are a few blog posts out there by folks who started reading Conan and were drawn up short by this monstrous, over-arching racism--or words to that effect. And then they'd blog about what a terrible person Robert E. Howard is. As if he was the first person in fantasy to write about different cultures in an insensitive way. Conan, Solomon Kane, and other stories about other characters--all racist. It's right there. It's repulsive. They just couldn't get through it.

I'm not going to defend the position that Howard isn't a racist. Partially because I think the word "racist" has come to mean something very different than what Funk and Wagnalls will tell you. I think "racist" in modern day language is another word for "outcast" or "pariah." It's verbal leprosy. Someone who is a racist is someone to be shunned, for fear that their disease, their poison, seep into your ears and eyes and rot your brain and turn you into one of them. This notion of the power of speech, or the printed word, is a new thing, I think, and certainly bears discussion somewhere else. But more to the point, "racist" implies that there's an active component in place; a willful need to infect others in a way that is impossible to defend against, like a zombie pathogen.

I won't lambast the younger generation for a lack of critical thinking skills, because that would be showing my age. But I will lambast the generation ahead of me for setting up this idea of "Political Correctness" that has led to a kind of intolerance for anything that is deemed offensive or hurtful to another person, regardless of context, meaning, and intent. Enough about that. We were talking about Robert E. Howard.

Here are some facts: Howard employed language which was well within societal norms in the 1920s and 1930s, but is certainly not appropriate now. Howard wrote about a variety of races and peoples and ethnicities, mostly in his fantasy stories, but also in a number of historical adventures. He used language that was stereotypical, and occasionally derogatory, when talking about these people. Sometimes, they were heroes. Sometimes they were sympathetically portrayed. Sometimes they were the bad guys. In a few cases, Howard wrote recurring characters of color. These characters and descriptions were based almost entirely on what he read in the pulps, and what books he was able to get his hands on. Some of those books were ten, fifteen, twenty years out of date. Other books were fictions by Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and other classic authors. Many of the pulps he read features stories set in other countries and time periods, and these pulps also published articles and letters about foreign countries and conflicts. So, for a guy who was landlocked in Central Texas, he did the best he could do.

The other reason why I won't defend the charge of racism is because, in the context of his time and place, Howard was, in fact, a racist. And so was your grandfather. And your great grandfather. And Rudyard Kipling. And Joseph Conrad. And Jack London. And Woodrow Wilson. And just about anyone born prior to 1960 in America. Institutional racism was in full swing, especially in Texas. Separate bathrooms, lynchings, you name it. It was all out there, if not in the wide open, at least tacitly understood. There are just some places you don't go; there are just some people you don't talk to. Granted, every community was different, but by and large, people of color who were a part of a mostly white community were included as exceptions rather than as a rule.  This was the world your grandparents grew up in, by the way. Yes, them, too.

Did Howard know any black people? Sure, a few. He knew a few Hispanics, a Jewish man, and saw and observed Italians, Chinese, and other immigrants in his travels to places like New Orleans and San Antonio. Some of his descriptions were drawn whole cloth from his experiences, or from letters he wrote to correspondents like H.P. Lovecraft, who was himself a xenophobe and a monstrous bigot.

None of this was known to me when I first discovered Robert E. Howard's Conan, coming out of comics and Dungeons and Dragons. There were some folks in the Conan stories who were freed slaves, and there were black, yellow, olive, dusky, and fair skinned people in Conan's world, and they were good, or bad, or rulers, or cowardly dogs, depending on which side of Conan's sword they were on. You can call it white blindness on my part, but I never read Howard's descriptions of ebony skinned cannibals and assumed that Howard was talking about all black men. In fact, it's pretty clear in the story that it's this one city and not everyone in the region. I always liked it when N'Longa, the witch doctor, showed up in the Solomon Kane stories. He was a very different person--on purpose--from straightlaced Puritan Solomon Kane himself. N'Longa gives Kane a Ju-Ju staff, which proves to be a useful magic item in Kane's arsenal against the dark forces. This is heathen magic that the Puritan supposedly has no truck with, and yet, they formed an alliance against monsters.

This was a common pairing in Howard's stories, from Kull and Brule the Spear-Slayer to the unlikely friendships found in Howard's historical tales of the Crusades, and the El Borak stories. A white, if not implicitly W.A.S.P. man, befriends or joins forces with a non-white character for fortune, glory, survival, or friendship. Sometimes it's the end result. Sometimes it's the motive for the story.

Yes, the Africans are "wooly headed." Yes, the Shemite has a hooked nose. I know, I know. That's bad. It's a sloppy shortcut. I won't defend it. Mostly.

It's stereotypical. It's stereotyping. And while it's today considered, well, stereotyping, back in all of popular culture--books, magazines, newspapers, the radio, comics--every media in existence prior to 1945, this was accepted. It was okay, even encouraged, to make these short, sharp descriptors and even judgements about people of other ethnicities than your own. All Irish were hot tempered fighters. All Jewish people were thrifty and shrewd with money. All Italians were overly amorous.  All French people were snobs. All Swedes were big and stupid. These weren't seen as detriments, but rather simplified ways of communicating a set of cultural values and general set of traits at a time when immigration had literally flooded America with millions of people from all over the world. These folks were trying to fit in, and any chance they had to "become Americans," they took. Right up to and including laughing at themselves. Stereotyping was employed by vitually every comedian from the age of Vaudeville up through the rise of radio and later, Television. Many of these comedians moved from medium to medium with their same act, nearly unchanged for forty years.

Jack Benny, a legendary Jewish comedian (who employed a black piano player named Rochester, who spoke in a gruff parody of southern black speech himself) had a very famous bit from his radio show. He's held up at gunpoint by a mugger one evening, who says, "Your money or your life." After a pause, the gunman says, "Well?" and Benny, in his trademark exasperated fashion, says "I'm thinking it over!" One of the recordings online has the audience laughing as soon as the mugger says "Your money or your life." They know Jack Benny, and it's already funny to think that he'd be put in a situation where he has to choose something he values more than his wealth. Stereotypical Jewish behavior, rewritten as a very funny one-liner.

So, I'll cop to it on my part: I never saw what others saw in some of Howard's stories. Not until I got to "Pigeons From Hell" as a teenager, when I first encountered the word "nigger" in the story, did I stop and think about what was going on. After all, that was a word that was forbidden in my house. Well, unless my grandfather said it. Or my father. But anyway. I had to suddenly walk through the time and place of the story and ask myself, "Would a sheriff use that word in casual conversation? In 1936?" And of course, the answer was yes. Yes, he would have. Doesn't mean it's not an ugly word, and while it was certainly a stumbling block, I picked the narrative back up and soldiered on.

The stereotyping was lost on me in the Conan stories. No one likes anyone in the Conan stories. Each country is at war with other countries. People from the Southern kingdoms hate people from the Northern kingdoms. No one has a flattering thing to say about anyone. But that's not the takeaway point of Conan.

N'Longa talks much like the stereotypical educated native to Solomon Kane, and he's definitely what Spike Lee calls a "Magical Negro" in literal, if not figurative, terms. But that's not the takeaway point of Solomon Kane.

Reading "The Ghost of Tom Molyneaux," it's obvious that Ace Jessel speaks in a dialect lifted straight from Huckleberry Finn, if not Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's uncomfortable to read, but that's not the takeaway from any of the boxing stories Howard wrote.

Howard wrote about conflict, often between two cultures, and the sometimes exceptional men that arise from a life built around conflict. Roman or Pict, Moor or Turk, Gael or Dane, and yeah, even White or Black, Howard's message was about overcoming impossible odds, never giving up, never admitting defeat. Howard wrote about the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, morality and scruples. He wrote about the character of masculinity--in other words, what makes a man. Interestingly, he also wrote a few stories about what makes a woman in a man's world, too. He wrote about the differences between civilization and barbarism and how blurred the line between them sometimes was.

That's what I see when I read Robert E. Howard's work, laid bare. And I know I'm not the only one because he's got millions of fans all over the world who see pretty much the same things. This in no way excuses the stereotyping, or some of the things he said to his friends. But as a reader with critical faculties in place, I think considering when and where he did his writing, it more than mitigates it.

Time and place have to mitigate content. Otherwise, we couldn't read Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, or anyone else born before 1945. But, then again, there's a copy of Huckleberry Finn floating around right now with nary and N-Bomb in sight, so what do I know?

This is new thinking. I'm pretty sure the kids these days (those in high school and college) aren't willingly reading Conrad, London, Hemingway, or any of the other old, dead, white-guy authors that were "racist douchebags." I don't know when that particular attitude of condemnation for anything that doesn't conform to ones' own internal barometer of taste sprang up, but I suspect it's got something to do with the inflated sense of entitlement and the utter lack of empathy that seems to be all the rage amongst today's hard-wired mall rats.

In the end, there is only the author's work, and the reader's relationship to it. I'm capable of cutting authors some slack when I read their dated works, but then again, I'm a doughy, pasty white guy. Technically, I'm "part of the problem." If you, as a reader, find something so objectionable in a book that it makes you fly into a rage, well, that's your journey, and who am I to say different? I've read some singularly distasteful things in my life--one that springs instantly to mind involves a rape that takes place in a Philip Jose Farmer novel called Lord Tyger. It made me uncomfortable. But after reading it, it didn't turn me into a rapist.

I've read books where the characters are utterly despicable, and say horrible things to and about other characters in the book. Reading those things brought out a number of reactions in me, but they didn't make me into a despicable person. They were just words. Fictional stories, full of words, at that. If they brought out an emotion from me, then the story did its job. Is that not the primary function of art?

Maybe instead of trying to bring the next generation of fans to Robert E. Howard, we need to be waving them off. If reading a word in a story is going to cause them to freak out and rage-quit the author, then that's more flailing about that we don't need. In the past, we've tried to put our best foot forward. We've tried to show critical examinations from both sides of a particular issue. If none of that matters because, well, he was a "racist douchebag," then why waste of of my time and effort? How can someone learn anything knew when they know everything already?

I don't have any answers. If you've read to the end of this very long post, and feel like discussing, have at it.

Happy 107th Birthday, Robert E. Howard

Author's Note: This is an artifact from the time capsule. In 2002, I was finishing up my first year in REHUPA and I wrote this review/rant in my 'zine for the month of December.  Please note the date--2002. I am pleased to report that since then, much of what I am kvetching about in this article has come to pass. Some of it, incredibly, was done by me. Other pieces and parts were picked up by others. And while I was not the first, nor the last, person to issue such a call to action, it was a shot in the arm for some folks. I've been a member of REHupa for 11 years now, and I didn't think I'd make it to year two. Shows what I know. One thing I have always tried to do is lead by example. And one of the things I've always tried to do is to do right by Robert E. Howard. Looking back on the radio shows, Blood & Thunder, all of the articles and essays, and now the ongoing academic push, I feel I've done just that. Read for yourself and see just how far Howard Studies has come. 

Happy Birthday, Bob. Thanks for the inspiration.

 A Bad Reputation: Robert E. Howard and the Indifference of the Academics

The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers

By Lee Server ISBN: 081604578X

From the early days of dime novels to contemporary mass-market paperbacks, pulp fiction is a vital part of popular culture. This volume offers a survey of the scores of well-known and unsung heroes of popular literature. It seeks to cover the entire spectrum of pop literature's greatest entertainers and artists; the multimillion-copy bestsellers; and the inventors of the modern genres, such as the western, the hardboiled detective novel, the spy thriller, science fiction, horror, the legal thriller, crime fiction and the erotic/romance novel. The work also profiles colourful but lesser-known underground figures, as well as a wide variety of talented paperback authors who were never given their due. Each of the 200 entries includes a brief biography along with a list of the author's writing credits. The authors covered include: V.C. Andrews; Ray Bradbury; Jackie Collins; Lester Dent; Ian Fleming; Erle Stanley Gardner; David Goodis; Zane Grey; Chester Himes; Louis L'Amour; H.P. Lovecraft; Mario Puzo; Jacqueline Susann; and more. (REPRODUCED FROM CONTENT ON AMAZON UK)

It was a new book, fresh off the presses, and I had it in my hands. Clearly, this book had my name written all over it. It was also written by Lee Server, and that name was familiar. It only took a second to realize that this was the same guy who had written Danger Is My Business back in 1993, the first illustrated book about the Pulps since Tony Goodwin’s titular effort in the 1970’s. Server had also written Over My Dead Body, about the lurid paperback novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, and Baby, I Don’t Care, a great biography about Robert Mitchum.

Ever curious, I eagerly flipped to the H section. There he was, roughly two pages worth: Howard, Robert E. The entry was a mixed bag. I won’t reprint the article verbatim for reasons that will become apparent below, but I will show some highlights, both good and bad.

Howard, Robert E.

(1906-1936) Also wrote as Sam Walser

Robert E. Howard, one of the great discoveries of the magnificent pulp magazine Weird Tales, wrote larger-than-life fantasy adventure tales for most of his brief but dazzling career. Much of his work belongs to a genre now called “sword and sorcery,” a category Howard himself helped to invent.

Robert Ervin Howard was born in 1906 in the small Texas town of Paster. When he was nine, the family moved to another small community, Cross Plains, where he would live with his mother and father for the rest of his life. Interested in writing from a very early age, he was greatly inspired by books of western lore. The pulps had begun to come into their own as Howard reaches his teen years. It was the heyday of Adventure magazine, Western Story, and other publications that offered a battery of new, imaginative, and innovative fiction writers, like Talbot MUNDY, with his combination of exotic locales, bizarre adventures, and touches of the occult and the magical, and his fearless, mighty superhero from the ancient world, the seafaring Tros of Samothrace; Harold Lamb, with his sweeping historical sagas and thundering warriors, Gordon Young, with his two-fisted, nihilistic, globe-trotting warriors; and H.P. LOVECRAFT, with his grim, disturbing horror stories and their stark portrayals of evil. These and other writers of the day would spark Howard’s own bursting imagination to empower his writing and the amazing body of work to come.

Outside of the typographical error of “Pastor” for “Peastor” and the exclusion of Howard’s other pseudonyms, these first two paragraphs aren’t so bad.

It was to Lovecraft’s pulp home, Weird Tales, that Howard made his first professional sale, Spear and Fang, which was printed in the July, 1925 issue. It was a momentous occasion. Howard would become a regular contributor to Weird Tales, and would also come to be known as one of that unique magazine’s three greatest contributors, with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton SMITH (though many of WT’s other regulars also had their rabid acolytes). Howard, unlike the other two members of the triumvirate, saw himself as a professional writer, and did write for other publications and in other genres—straight adventure, westerns, boxing stories—though he did not have much success in breaking into the mainstream prestige pulps (such as Adventure, Argosy, and the like). In retrospect, the ornate, daring, out-of-the-mainstream pages of Weird Tales were the perfect place for a writer as different and powerful as Robert E. Howard.

His stories were intensely imagined, action-packed, ruthless, and blood-drenched, written in a vivid, harsh, muscular prose. He created an assortment of fierce, pitiless warrior-heroes. There was Bran Mak Morn, leader of the Caledonian Picts against the legions of ancient Rome; Solomon Kane, an Elizabethan Puritan, battling savagery and sorcery in darkest Africa; Kull, a king in the antediluvian Atlantis; and his most popular and still thriving creation, Conan, the barbarian adventurer.

Okay, two more paragraphs that I won’t quibble with. Factually acceptable and not misleading in any way. So far, so good, from Mr. Server. But I had the strangest feeling I had seen some of this before. Especially in the next long paragraph, which talked about the Hyborian Age and how Howard jumped around chronologically in telling the Conan stories. He quoted from Conan in “Queen of the Black Coast,” the passage about life being an illusion and burning with life. “I love, I slay, and am content.” The next paragraph is very interesting.

Physically, Howard had grown up to be a powerful-looking young man who might well have served as a model for the illustrations of the sword-wielding heroes who strode across his pulp stories. But there was psychic autobiography at work in those pages, too. In dreams Howard often saw himself as an ancient barbarian, and some of that self-absorption and passionate identification with the character gave Conan and other Howard characters their vivacity. It is part of the mythos of Weird Tales, part of what put that pulp in a category apart from all others of the 20’s and 30’s, the hectic golden age of pulp hackery—the notion that writers like Howard were stranger characters than the other pulp pros, in some way or other more closely a part of the material they invented, whether from artistry or psychological disturbance. For the readers, anyway, the result was stories that could have an intense, hallucinatory force and yet felt very real. Howard put readers right inside those barbaric, imaginary landscapes. His typewriter caught the blinding glare on flashing steel, missed no splash of crimson blood, described landscapes that were at once familiar and bizarre, but three dimensional, pumping with life.

This is damning with faint praise, in my opinion. It’s nice that Mr. Server notes that there’s a mythos to the lunacy of the WT writers, but doesn’t really refute anything said about Howard. His comments about Howard’s prose are spot-on, but again Server leads with the crazy vibe. Apparently one can’t write well unless they are bonkers. The next paragraph continues this thought.

Fantasy and “weird” stories and publication in the marginal, little-read Weird Tales was not considered a particularly admirable accomplishment in some areas of America in the 1930s. In the constricted community Robert Howard lived in, writing for Weird Tales—particularly as a result of the sexual, bosom-heaving cover art of Margaret Brundage—looked not unlike writing pornography. (Adding insult to injury, Weird Tales was often very far behind in its payments to contributors, even—or perhaps especially—to regular contributors like Howard.) Though as a young man he participated in the typical masculine rites of hunting, fishing and drinking, Howard was not a typical Texas boy at all. With his brooding, his daydreaming, and his bizarre imagination, he clearly stood apart from the simple farmers and small-town mentalities of Cross Plains, and was generally thought to be something of a strange duck among the locals. Howard once wrote, “It is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign to the people among which one’s lot is cast.”

This is now the third usage of the word “bizarre” in this article. Clearly, it’s the only adjective that really applies to Howard and his work, since it’s so frequently referenced. And while the facts in the above paragraph may be accurate, the slant in the writing shows that Mr. Server is at best uncaring or at worst antagonistic about the details of Howard’s personal life. The very next paragraph:

Howard was known to have been unusually devoted to his domineering mother. He was prone to bouts of despairing self-reflection and spoke of suicide on a number of occasions (though depression did not seem to slow his productivity, as thousands of pages of prose, poetry, and correspondence flowed from his battered Underwood typewriter).

In the spring of 1936, Mrs. Howard became gravely ill. On the morning of June 11, after a sleepless night at his comatose mother’s bedside, Robert was informed that she would never recover. At the typewriter in his workroom he wrote some lines of poetry, then went outside to the family’s ’31 Chevrolet sedan. From the glove compartment he took out a Colt .380 he had borrowed from a friend, thumbed the safety, placed the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

There it is. Howard and his mother. Again. What’s nice about this is the intimation that Howard wasn’t depressed enough to not write, just depressed enough to kill himself over his mother.

The next paragraph is a long quote from Jack Scott (and that same anecdote, yet again, about the lines and the coroner). Following that is the eulogy from Farnsworth Wright that ran in Weird Tales. The article ends with a completely inaccurate bibliography of Howard’s works, the only parts of which that are correct is the list of the Conan stories. All other material is mislabeled, missing altogether, or just wrong.

As you can imagine, this entry angered me and sent me into my own books, looking for my copy of Danger Is My Business. There, on pages 43-45, I found just about the same information, in a different order, as what was listed in the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. To his credit, Mr. Server had updated his material slightly, removing the reference to “his love life—or lack of it—has been the subject of much speculation” just prior to mentioning his domineering mother and unusual devotion. So, it’s a step forward, I suppose, but in my mind, it’s still a baby step.

The fact is, Mr. Server simply reworked what he had already done some ten years ago and stuck it in the book. While there was no mention of, for example, Cornell Woolrich’s alternative lifestyle in his entry (it must have just slipped Mr. Server’s mind), I can’t think of any reason why Mr. Server would have wanted to rewrite any of his material on Howard...especially since no one has published anything to the contrary in any visible form since 1993.

There have been exceptions, to be sure. James Van Hise put out a great book a few years back (The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard) that was, in fact, a collection of scholarship from REHupa. I have a second printing of the book, because the first printing sold out. After I got my copy, I never saw another one again. Then there was Cross Plains Comics’ Short Biography of REH, written by our own Rusty Burke. Sold primarily to comic shops, it was marketed more like a graphic novel/art collection than any kind of serious scholarship. We can count in this short list The Whole Wide World, based on One Who Walked Alone. It got an art house release and then went straight to...well, laserdisc. No current DVD plans at this time, at least not that I have heard. Let’s see, have I left anyone out? Oh yes, Wandering Star. Currently aimed at the collector’s market, with affordable trade paperbacks due out in the next year or two...hopefully.

This in no way diminishes the value of the above work. I enthusiastically supported and publicly applauded all of the above endeavors, and will continue to do so. But on the thirtieth anniversary of REHupa, and on the heels of Leo Grin’s well-reasoned rant about how much money these newsletters cost and how many copies of REHupa are to be distributed, I say to you that we are doing it wrong.

Every time Howard gets omitted in anthologies like The American Fantasy Tradition, every time Howard’s name and deeds are crucified by idiotic directors on special edition DVDs, every time the inaccurate facts and “crazy” bias of Howard’s biography get reprinted over and over, we all write emails, articles in REHupa, and bitch to each other and to our significant others. Well, it’s our fault that it happens.

How long has Dark Valley Destiny been out, been available in shops? In 2003, it’ll be twenty years. Isn’t it time for a new Howard biography? How about some serious examinations of his work, his influence? Better still, is there any reason at all for these kinds of things to not be available to as many people as want to see them?

There is a pop culture/American culture association, made up of college professors and other academics, with national and regional groups. I stumbled onto their listserv and told them I was a writer. They signed me up. I’m stunned at the paper topics that get presented; it’s stuff that we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Buffy and Lesbian Culture. The Role of Board Games in the Twentieth Century. I’m not kidding. There was an X-Men question that ran through the listserv about two months ago. College professors and doctors with PhDs were scrambling to wax factual about Magneto.

Is there any reason that anyone can give me why some, if not all of the REHupans, aren’t involved with this organization? Has anyone introduced themselves to Carlton Stowers, who wrote that great article about REH in the free Dallas weekly last year? Where’s your website with your section devoted to your REH scholarship? Going to Cross Plains isn’t going to cut it, not if you are looking for a literary conversion. Put your face out there. Write your book (or finish it) and then speak to others about it. We need to be who people ask about Robert E. Howard, not Lee Server, or John Milius.

All of you are accomplished writers, with passionate arguments about REH and a strong desire to see his name restored and his literary works made available. It is time to reach out of the bubble and step forward with your knowledge. Sitting on your hands isn’t going to do it; not anymore. If we want to repair Howard’s image, we need to assume that no one else is going to do it for us.

I intend to present a paper on REH at the 2004 Southwest Pop Culture/American Culture Conference. I want some, if not all of you to be there with me. Let’s wake up the rest of the academic world and restore REH’s place in literary history.